Will Facebook Home lead to big changes?

Michael Goodwin, senior partner for HTC, displays an HTC First smartphone with the new Facebook interface - showing a photo of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg - at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park.

Michael Goodwin, senior partner for HTC, displays an HTC First smartphone with the new Facebook interface - showing a photo of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg - at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park.

Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez, Associated Press

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is flanked by CEO of AT&T Mobility Ralph de la Vega (left) and HTC CEO Peter Chou as they face the press at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is flanked by CEO of AT&T Mobility Ralph de la Vega (left) and HTC CEO Peter Chou as they face the press at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park.

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Will Facebook Home lead to big changes?

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In announcing his company's latest product, Facebook Home, Mark Zuckerberg talked about flipping the world of mobile phones around to place people over apps.

But clearly, the company is also trying to make sure Facebook remains front and center in the lives of an increasingly mobile generation.

That philosophy is quite a turnaround for a company that, just a year ago, didn't have a defined mobile strategy.

"When they do something like this, it shows they are aware of how they need to do something different and bold on mobile," said Chris Silva, a mobile-industry analyst for the Altimeter Group of San Mateo.

Facebook is trying to capitalize on a clear trend in consumer behavior, amply evidenced by the number of people who stand in coffee lines or train platforms with their heads bowed toward their smartphones. It could also be an attempt to combat Facebook fatigue by always keeping the social network at the forefront.

The strategy, Silva suggests, isn't so much an effort to keep pushing "Facebook in my face, but putting Facebook where my face always is."

Thursday's press conference revealed a lot about the social network's higher mobile aspirations.

For several years, tech rumor mills churned out story after story about how Facebook engineers were toiling away in some deep, dark corner of its Menlo Park headquarters creating a Facebook-branded mobile phone.

Zuckerberg consistently shot down those rumors, saying it wouldn't make sense to try to sell one phone that might be used by 20 million people when it had more than 1 billion members.

Indeed, Facebook doesn't just want to sell its own phone - it wants to be the "soul" of every smartphone in the world, and right now, that's more than 1 billion units.

Facebook Home is more than an app, but it's not completely a phone or an operating system either. Even its name is sort of a misnomer, since it's designed to be used even when Android phone owners are away from home.

Facebook has been relying on single-purpose mobile apps, such as Messenger or Camera, or its main social-networking app. But Zuckerberg called Home a "family of apps" that starts with Cover Feed, a feature designed to replace the phone's home and lock screens as the first thing Android phone users see when they flick on the screen, feeding updates from the Facebook News Feed.

"It brings Facebook as far forward on the phone as you could possibly want, which is great for Facebook and may very well be good for Facebook users as well," said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of tech news site Search Engine Land.

"This is huge, especially if they start bringing the ads in to the front of your home page when you turn on your phone," he said.

Investor pressure

Since the company went public last year, investors have clamored for proof that it can generate huge amounts of revenue from its 680 million monthly average mobile users, who now outnumber those who come to its website.

For now, Facebook Home won't include ads. But when asked if there will be ads someday, all Zuckerberg would say was, "Yup."

Silva said Facebook should first develop strong guidelines for advertisers to avoid being too intrusive or annoying.

"One bad or intrusive ad campaign could ruin the whole thing," he said.

The company also showed off how messages will be represented by Chat Heads, little circular Facebook profile photos that pop up when those electronic missives arrive.

Chat Heads are mainly aimed at younger Facebook users because text messages are "the way they communicate with their peers, their colleagues and their friends," Silva said.

Younger users also remain a demographic that's a key to Facebook's continued success; the company has publicly fretted this cohort might gravitate away from Facebook.

Chat Heads icons can be moved around the screen or swiped from view with flick of a finger, but they also can remain on screen, allowing Android users to multitask by reading a news story or listening to a song.

And this is without having to launch other apps, even Google's own.

Regular updates

Facebook promises to regularly update the Home app with more features, a schedule that is easier to accomplish under Google's open-source Android system than within Apple's controlled iOS system.

Zuckerberg politically sidestepped a question of when Facebook Home would be coming to an iPhone, saying his company has a "great relationship with Apple," yet "anything that happens with Apple is going to happen through partnership with them."

In reality, the kind of monthly update schedule Facebook plans would be nearly impossible to do in the iOS system, Silva said.

With Android, Facebook engineers "don't need to ask permission, they can just go and do it," he said. "I'd be surprised to see it coming to iOS in the future ... unless this really changes the tide."